Ken Ward, Jr., a reporter for The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette, is a native of Mineral County, W.Va., and a graduate of West Virginia University. Since starting at the Gazette in 1991, Ward, 41, has received numerous regional and national reporting awards for his coverage of strip mining, pulp mills, timbering and medical waste incinerators. Read his stories on mountaintop removal here or follow him on his Coal Tattoo blog or Twitter at http://twitter.com/Kenwardjr.

Ward is a three-time winner of the Scripps Howard Foundation's Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting and in 2000 received the prestigious Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Ward is also chairman of the Society of Environmental Journalists' First Amendment Task Force.

Mine safety has been part of his beat during most of his 16 years at the Gazette. He covered the Sago and Darby Mine disasters and the Aracoma Mine fire in 2006, and later that year spent six months researching coal mine issues as an Alicia Patterson Fellow. The resulting series, Beyond Sago,received an Investigative Reporters and Editors medal.

Contributions

Mining the coal beat: Keeping watch over an 'outlaw' industrySHOWCASE | June 07, 2009In its Summer 2009 issue, Nieman Reports continues to focus on investigative reporting. In one piece, Ken Ward, Jr., a leading writer on the coal industry, explains how a coal firm reported, on its own, that it violated water pollution limits 4,500 times over a 5-year period—and how, in response, regulators did absolutely nothing. Nada. (From Nieman Reports.)

Why are Tennessee residents buried in coal ash?ASK THIS | December 30, 2008West Virginia reporter Ken Ward, Jr., an expert on the coal industry, says some good reporting has been done on the Dec. 22 TVA dam break, but a lot more needs to be done—including following the paper trail to find out why the dam broke in the first place.

Why is it OK for the coal industry to break the law?ASK THIS | August 10, 2007Often after accidents like the one at Crandall Canyon, Utah, mine operators claim their mines had relatively few violations. Even if that's true -- and often it isn't -- 'relatively few' just isn’t good enough in a risky venture like coal mining, says Charleston Gazette reporter Ken Ward, Jr.